Presented by the Mandell Jewish Community Center with Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies and The Hartt School, University of Hartford.

Saturday, March 13, 2010 8:00 p.m.
Aetna Theater, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

Opening Night

This adorable short finds a charming Jewish bride torn between her family’s pre-nuptial tradition of killing and cooking gefilte fish versus her growing sympathy for the live carp splashing around in her bathtub. Will she show mercy or go through with the traditional pre-wedding feast? This universally-appealing fish story bubbles with humor, romance and fun.

Gala Opening Night Reception Follows Films

Legendary French actors Gérard Depardieu (Cyrano de Bergerac) and Fanny Ardant (The Secrets) reunite in this romantic comedy about the misadventures of a Jewish Parisian couple. Alain is a successful gynecologist, and Gisèle, who converted when they married, is charming and beautiful. They enjoy a comfortable life—until their only son announces plans to marry a Catholic girl. Facing an empty nest and midlife crisis, they leave their posh home in Paris and travel to Israel in search of their neglected Jewish roots. In opting for a fresh start in the Land of Milk and Honey, some of their plans turn sour, and their relationship is soon put to the test.

Sunday, March 14, 3:00 p.m.
Herbert Gilman Theater, Mandell JCC

This animated tale is based on the popular PJ Library selection, Something From Nothing and tells the story of a young boy, his grandfather, a magic blanket, and a lucky mouse. The time-honored tale celebrates Jewish culture and tradition.

Sunday, March 14, 12:00 p.m.
K & G Theatres, Bloomfield 8, Bloomfield

In the picturesque Israeli Negev desert lays the Bedouin village of El-Sayed. It has the largest percentage of deaf people in the world. Still, no hearing aids can be seen because in El-Sayed deafness is not a handicap. Through the generations a unique sign language has evolved making it the most popular language in this rare society that accepts deafness as natural as life itself. The village's tranquility is interrupted by Salim's decision to change his deaf son’s fate and make him a hearing person using the Cochlear Implant Operation provided by Israeli doctors.

Emerging Artist Award, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival

Sunday, March 14, 2:00 p.m.
K & G Theatres, Bloomfield 8, Bloomfield

This riveting documentary chronicles the 30-year international campaign to free Soviet Jews. Told through the eyes of activists on both sides of the Iron Curtain, Refusenik is a tapestry of first-person accounts of heroism, sacrifice and liberation. The Free Soviet Jewry movement led to over one million Russian Jews leaving the Soviet Union, changing the course of Jewish history forever. Exclusive interviews, clandestine photographs, and archival footage help tell this inspiring true story of freedom-seeking ordinary people who cracked the wall of Soviet Communism.

Sunday, March 14, 5:00 p.m.
K & G Theatres, Bloomfield 8, Bloomfield

Bruriah, the outspoken controversial wife of Rabbi Meir from the second century CE, finds her 20th century namesake and counterpart in the modern-day heroine of Avraham Kushnir’s debut feature film. Against her husband’s wishes, the strong-willed contemporary Bruriah (Hadar Galron) searches for a banned book written about the legendary woman by her father. The ancient Bruriah met her downfall when seduced by a student, prompting generations of rabbis to teach that “women are light-headed.” Will history repeat? This dramatic multi-dimensional film is also about the war between the sexes, marital affairs and Orthodox women’s rights. Bruriah will leave viewers of both sexes with something to think and argue about.

Sunday, March 14, 7:00 p.m.
K & G Theatres, Bloomfield 8, Bloomfield

Salma, a Palestinian widow finds her family’s beloved lemon grove threatened when the country’s new Defense Minister moves next door and deems the trees a security risk that must be torn down. Forced to take her seemingly hopeless case to the Israeli Supreme Court, she finds an unlikely ally in the stubborn politician’s wife and a young Palestinian lawyer. This award-winning film turns a minor backyard skirmish into an affective parable of a politicized region.

Best Actress, Israeli Film Academy
Nominated for seven Israeli Academy Awards
Audience Award, 2008, Berlin International Film Festival

Lemon Tree will also be screened on Wednesday, March 17, 9:15 p.m. at Criterion Cinema, Blue Back Square, West Hartford.

Monday, March 15, 7:00 p.m.
Beth El Temple, West Hartford

Israel’s answer to Billy Elliot, this irresistible multi-layered coming-of-age film finds young Chen caught in the clashing crossroads between his lively Russian-born mother and opinionated Israeli father. While strolling the halls of his neighborhood community center in Ashdod, Chen stumbles upon a children’s ballroom dance class and is smitten by Natalie, a beautiful young Russian girl. Infatuation leads him to take lessons in the hope of winning the final competition. With a little help from the Cha Cha and the Tango, Chen bridges the culture gap of his fractured family.

Invited Performers: Dance Students, Fred Astaire Studio, West Hartford

Tuesday, March 16, 7:00 p.m.
Herbert Gilman Theater, Mandell JCC, West Hartford

This is the remarkable, yet little-known, story of Righteous Gentile Francisca Halamajowa, a Polish-Catholic woman who rescued 16 of her Jewish neighbors in the small Eastern Polish town of Sokal during the Holocaust, while cleverly passing herself off as a Nazi sympathizer. Francisca’s two granddaughters. Grace Kucharzyk and Jolanta Staron live in Greater Hartford and play a prominent role in this award-winning film. This stunning film draws on excerpts from a diary kept by one of the survivors, Moshe Maltz, whose granddaughter is one of the filmmakers. It also incorporates remarkable testimonies from other Jews she saved, her descendants and former neighbors, as they reconnect on a beautifully filmed trip back to Sokal.

Grand Prize, Best Feature Documentary,
Rhode Island International Film Festival, 2009
CINE Golden Eagle Award, 2009
Silver Palm Award, Mexico International Film Festival, 2009

Wednesday, March 17
2:00 PM Exclusively for Hebrew Health Care residents
4:30 PM Free for seniors by advance reservation only; limited seating
Herbert Health Care

A group of fourth and fifth graders form an intergenerational chorus with a group of older adults. Brought together by a dynamic music teacher, Arlene Symons, and motivated by their abilities, interest, and enthusiasm for music, these children and their older counterparts break down the stereotypical image of aging in this delightfully warm documentary.

Best Short Documentary, Academy Awards, 1981
EMMY Award, 1982

Between 1880 and 1924, 2.5 million Jews fled persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe, kissed the shtetl goodbye and migrated to America. Turning a fresh, playful eye to the cultural attitudes and musical styles that proliferated throughout this extraordinarily rich period, from Yiddish theater to musical extravaganza, from klezmer to ragtime, from symphonic jazz to swing - all the way from the Bowery to Tin Pan Alley to Broadway to Hollywood –From Shtetl to Swing tells the story of a musical metamorphosis born in darkest Russia only to blaze across the Great White Way.

Wednesday, March 17, 7:00 p.m.
Criterion Cinema, Blue Back Square, West Hartford

"Reel Talk" Immediately following film

Invited Speakers:
Dr. Donna Robinson Divine, Morningstar
   Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Government,
   Smith College, Amherst, MA
Dr. Moises Salinas, Chief Diversity
   Officer and Associate Professor, Department of Psychology,
   Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, CT

Guest Moderator: From Hartford Courant/FOX CT/WTXX

Tarek, a young Palestinian sent on a suicide bombing mission inside Israel to redeem his family’s honor, is given a second chance when the switch fails to detonate on his explosive vest. Stranded in Tel Aviv for 48 hours awaiting its repair, Tarek develops deep and profound connections with three Israelis whose lives intersect with his. Among them is beautiful Keren, who has cut off contact with her Orthodox family. An unlikely love between born enemies blooms by weekend’s end, when Tarek must make the decision of his life.

Winner, Moscow International Film Festival 2008
Best Film, Sofia Film Festival, Bulgaria, 2009
Winner, Audience Award, Cinequest Film Festival
Grand Prix Award, Best Feature Film
Nominated for seven Israeli Academy Awards

Wednesday, March 17, 9:15 p.m.
Criterion Cinema, Blue Back Square, West Hartford

Salma, a Palestinian widow finds her family’s beloved lemon grove threatened when the country’s new Defense Minister moves next door and deems the trees a security risk that must be torn down. Forced to take her seemingly hopeless case to the Israeli Supreme Court, she finds an unlikely ally in the stubborn politician’s wife and a young Palestinian lawyer. This award-winning film turns a minor backyard skirmish into an affective parable of a politicized region.

Wine & Food Event March 18

Yosefa Drescher Fine Arts invites you to a free pre-movie art,photography, wine and food event on Thursday, March 18, 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.,at "art-full" gallery in Blue Back Square, 63 Raymond Rd, opposite REI. (Purchase your tickets first, films sell out quickly!)

Thursday, March 18, 7:00 p.m.
Criterion Cinema, Blue Back Square, West Hartford

This luminous feature is set in an agrarian Jewish colony in the late 1800s in scenic Entre Rios Province, Argentina. Marked as “ugly” and made virtually invisible by her family, Gertrudis retreats into her inner world. Finally married off to a wealthy but indifferent husband, she raises a family, shielding her face from group photos. It takes one soulful itinerant photographer to recognize her rich imagination and unleash the beautiful woman inside. Sumptuously photographed with artistic imagery, this is an innovative love story which captures a rarely seen period in South American Jewish life.

Nominated for 8 Argentinean Film Critics Association Awards
Grand Prize, Pays de Caux International Latin Film Festival, 2009

Thursday, March 18, 9:15 p.m.
Criterion Cinema, Blue Back Square, West Hartford

Israeli diva Gila Almagor heads a stellar international cast in this ticking-clock espionage thriller as Rachel, a former Mossad agent-turned-war hero. She was part of a trio of spies hailed for hunting down and killing Max Rainer, the Nazi Surgeon of Birkenau in 1964. Rachel is drawn back to her past when a man claiming to be the real Rainer surfaces in Kiev three decades later. The tense action flashes between the 1960s and the present as their tangled web of lies unravels, threatening to expose the truth.

Nominated for 4 Israeli Academy Awards

Saturday, March 20, 8:30 p.m.
Aetna Theater, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

This is the poignant animated short story of two ugly people ("meeskeits," in Yiddish) and the beautiful relationship they never had.

Herzl, (Itzik Cohen) a 340-pound chef who lives with his mother, is fed up with rigid diet regimes and abusive weight loss clubs. Just as he and his seriously overweight buddies in the working-class town of Ramle seem beaten down, Herzl meets Kitano, a Sushi restaurant owner, and discovers the one place where big guys can become rock stars: Japanese sumo wrestling. This endearing and poignant comedy traces their tender and funny paths from body shame to body celebration, and from loneliness to love. Rich in belly laughs, A Matter of Size tops the scales with its plus-size heart.

Winner, four 2009 Ophir Awards, Israeli Film and Television Academy

Sunday, March 21, 12:00 p.m.
K & G Theatres, Bloomfield 8, Bloomfield

This jaunty documentary about Hebrew hoopsters is a valuable reminder that before LeBron and Kobe, there was Inky, Hank and Ossie! For nearly three decades, basketball was dominated by Jewish players - and coaches who found the sport an ideal vehicle for assimilation in the United States. The First Basket rounds up many Jewish veterans, some now deceased, to tell stories of a sporting tradition that continues in Israel today. Full of vivid anecdotes and distinctive characters, this film is slam dunk March madness entertainment for the whole family.

Appropriate for all ages.

Sunday, March 21
K & G Theatres, Bloomfield 8, Bloomfield

Greater Hartford Jewish women who served in the military and on the home front during World War II tell their stories of friendship, adventure and sacrifice and opportunity. Blending narrative, original photos, memorabilia, historical news footage and music, this important documentary captures the voices and memories of women of the Greatest Generation.

Sunday, March 21, 3:00 p.m.
K & G Theatres, Bloomfield 8, Bloomfield

In Ori Ravid’s debut feature coming-of-age film, heartthrob Lior Ashkenazi (Walk on Water) plays father and husband Ben, the city architect of the Tel Aviv suburb, Herzliya. Ben’s father, also an architect, is about to win the Israel Prize. Ben’s son, Eli, is 12. Watching the police take his father into custody changes everything for Eli. When the police question him about his father’s actions, Eli begins to feel like a double agent.

Sunday, March 21, 5:00 p.m.
K & G Theatres, Bloomfield 8, Bloomfield

This unapologetically sentimental rite-of-passage film will surely elicit tears and tender emotion. Having lost her mother to a terminal illness, Jenny enters her teenage years after a
bittersweet Bat Mitzvah. Despite a caring and devoted father, a series of letters from her late mother are Jenny’s only comfort in times of crisis and confusion. Traveling from South America to Israel, Jenny reconnects with her Jewish identity and a handsome childhood friend now serving in the Israel Defense Forces. A feisty lead performance from Argentine actress Gimena Accardi fuels this picturesque tale that tugs deeply at the ties that bind in surprising new ways.

Appropriate for ages 13+

Sunday, March 21, 7:00 p.m.
K & G Theatres, Bloomfield 8, Bloomfield

Adapted from Marge Spiegel’s stirring memoir, this is the riveting true story of courageous Westphalian German farmers who risked their own lives and sheltered Jewish friends from the Nazis. Genial Jewish horse trader Menne Spiegel (Armin Rohde) won an Iron Cross fighting for Germany in World War I but now he and his family are marked for murder. Desperate, he turns to neighbor Heinrich Aschoff (Martin Horn) who immediately offers to take in Menne's wife Marga (Veronica Ferres) and their young daughter. Hiding for two years and running from nosy SS officers, over-enthusiastic Hitler Youth and frightened citizens, the Spiegels struggle to get by. At film’s end, the appearance of characters whose real life stories are told adds depth to a fine production filled with emotional power and a constant sense of dread.

Monday, March 22, 7:00 p.m.
Wilde Auditorium, Harry Jack Gray Center, University of Hartford

The Mandell JCC thanks the Kirstein Family Fund for Holocaust Education at the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Hartford for making this second annual evening of short films possible. The selection committee viewed more than 50 entries from around the world, selecting eight titles for screening and conversation. A “Reel Talk” audience discussion will be led by Professor Avinoam Patt, Philip D. Feltman Professor of Modern Jewish History, Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies, University of Hartford. A dessert reception follows.

Leah is a beautiful baby with bright blue eyes - eyes that might have permitted her to survive Hitler's Third Reich because they might have seemed so "Aryan."

Set during World War II and based on a true story, Pigeon recounts a rare and startling act of charity. Sumptuously shot and emotionally affecting, this film stars Academy Award nominee Michael Lerner and Wendy Crewson.

Special Jury Award, Houston World Fest.

Inspired by his 85 year old grandmother, Hayah Zisel, filmmaker Adi Targownik’s 3D animated short tells the story of two girls – Hayah and her sister Sarah - on a train bound for their deaths in 1944. But only one of them is really there. His unusual computer cartoon-shading technique creates a distinct tribute "in memory of those who were killed."

In the Fall of 2008, a Jew from Gloucester, Massachusetts bought a house in picturesque Oppenheim, Germany. He became the first Jew to live in that city since the director’s mother, Marianne Orkin of Waterbury, CT, fled the Nazis with her brother and parents in 1941. The Next Harvest, filmed on location in this small city on the Rhine, will link viewers to the past through the story of the director’s grandfather, Carl Newman, once a respected Oppenheim vintner and last head of its thriving Jewish community.

"The Wall" is a glimpse into the life of Bernard, a New York City cellist who, after years of struggling against unbearable guilt, finds little solace in the world, save for his music. As Bernard’s fate hangs in the balance, a woman moves next door who shares not only his passion for music but is herself no stranger to tragedy.
Best Use of Music: Academy of Television Arts and Sciences College Award, 2008

Best Graduate Student Film: Rhode Island Film Festival, 2008.

Real-life Franz Stangl, the Commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp from 1942 to 1943, enjoyed a most unusual relationship with the Jewish slave who cooked his meals. Teetering on the brink of insanity, their daily rituals were held together by a tenuous thread—until the cargo train brought a surprising arrival.

Best Drama, Los Angeles International Short Film Festival
Best Film, Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films
Official Selection, Edinburgh International Film Festival

Contains mature thematic Holocaust material with graphic images, recommended for high school age and above.

1942: What happens when a German child believes that his Jewish neighbors are going to Toyland? A story about lies and guilt.

Best Live Action Short, Academy Awards 2008

In 1945, the Dachau concentration camp was liberated by American troops. Among them was a young American journalist, Marguerite Higgins, on the biggest war reporting job of her career up to that point. Beyond the objective history recording, there was always a human being behind the pen and the camera lens who personally experienced the discovery of such atrocities.

Contains mature thematic Holocaust materials with graphic images, recommended for high school age and above.

Audience Award, The Imperial War Museum’s Student Film Festival, 2006
Los Angeles Holocaust Memorial Museum Award, 2009

Tuesday, March 23, 7:00 p.m.
Herbert Gilman Theater, Mandell Jewish Community Center

New! Silent Film, Live Music!

This classic Jewish silent film is a Hollywood adaptation of the short stories of Anzia Yezierska, the first writer to bring stories of American Jewish women to a mainstream audience. Hungry Hearts focuses on the hopes and hardships of the Levin family. Filmed on New York's Lower East Side, it is the bittersweet tale of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe making their way in the New World. The screening will feature an original score composed and performed ‘live-to-picture’ by seventy student musicians from The Hartt School, University of Hartford, under the instruction of award-winning composer Joseph Turrin and the direction of Glen Adsit.

The Hartt School, University of Hartford

On Closing Night, The Hartt School, University of Hartford and the Hartford Jewish Film Festival bring back the almost-lost art of the silent film era when live musicians played onstage accompanying an on-screen movie. Join us for a musical grand finale evening in the Herbert Gilman Theater, followed by a dessert reception.

Glen Adsit, Associate Director of Instrumental Studies Division and Director of Bands
Matthew Aubin, Associate Director of Bands
Dr. Robert Carl, Chairman/Professor of Composition
Joseph Turrin, Faculty, Composition and Film Scoring

Student Composers, The Hartt School
Eunsook Baek
Jonathan Dostou
Matthew Ferrandino
Joshua Hummel
Daniel Morel
Sean Pallatroni
The Ensemble, The Hartt School Symphony Band

Click here to download ticket order form

Program subject to change.
All events under Hartford Kashrut Commission supervision

Contact:
Harriet J. Dobin, Director and Press, 860-231-6350, hdobin@mandelljcc.org
14th Annual Mandell JCC Hartford Jewish Film Festival
Zachs Campus
335 Bloomfield Ave.
West Hartford, CT 06117